After having reviewed Salt, Salt Formulas and reclass, it’s now time to put everything together to deploy OpenStack from openstack-salt project which use an elegant Model-Driven Architecture stored in a git repository which can be used for the life cycle management, auditing and documenting your infrastructure. Imagine a service oriented, repeatable, documented tooling to deploy OpenStack which also can be used to Deploy monitoring Update OpenStack config Audit the deployment through git workflow Document it from a single source of truth Upgrade OpenStack With the following core principles ...

Now that data center are software driven, it is crucial to have a single source of truth, a kind of know all inventory about your resources, your nodes, their functions and their associated parameters, which describe everything and store it in a single location. Welcome reclass which use Class inheritance to define nodes roles and avoid duplication by gathering all important datacenter parameters in a central location. All of this will then be used by your automation tools like Salt, Ansible or Puppet to bootstrap your infrastructure as a software. In other words, reclass can be classified as a hierarchical inventory management solution. Let see how we could use it with Salt. ...

Always reinventing the wheel doesn’t pay off most of the time, so telling Salt what to do by creating Salt States again and again to install application components isn’t really efficient. Instead Salt Formulas brings convention and a bit of magic, and offer reusable bundles which package altogether all the necessary piece to automate a specific task, like deploying etcd, a distributed key value store cluster, which we will take as an example in this article. ...

The amazing world of configuration management software is really well populated these days. You may already have looked at Puppet, Chef or Ansible but that’s not all of it, today we focus on SaltStack. Simplicity is at its core without any compromise on speed or scalability. Some users have up to 10.000 minions or more. Salt remote execution is built on top of an event bus which makes Salt unique. ...

With more and more applications, Docker, InfluxDB, Kubernetes, etcd, Grafana, using Go as their foundation, it’s interesting to understand the reasoning behing it. In this article we’ll also share some pointers and cheatsheet to learn Go. Introduction Go was first introduced in 2007 at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. The main objective was to solve their own issues. Google developpers were using C/C++, Java and Python, complexity was growing and it became harder to maintain a level of coherence between their different projects. All three creators shared their dislike of C++ complexity as a primary motivation for designing a new language. ...

Kargo (a.k.a Kubespray) is an initiative to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using Ansible. It will contrast with our previous Step by Step article by showing that we can deploy a cluster with a single command, a bit like the newly integrated SwarmKit feature announced in Docker 1.12 docker swarm init. Introduction As you’ve seen in our Step by Step article, deploying a Kubernetes cluster manually is a long, error prone and tedious process. This exercice was just meant as a learning exercice, to understand the different moving parts and how everything fits together. ...

Tectonic from CoreOS is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution which simplifies management operation of a k8s environment by leveraging CoreOS, fleet, Rkt and Flannel. In this article we’ll manually build a cluster of three CoreOS nodes on top of VMware Fusion to see how all of this fits together. Introduction Kubernetes is already available, ready to consume as a Service from Google, Platform9 where you’ll quickly be up and running. They are also some automation tooling, like Ansible Playbooks, SaltStack or bootKube, specifically built to rapidly deploy a cluster with all the required components. ...

For years Google is driving its infrastructure using containers with a system named Borg, they are now sharing their expertise with an Open Source container cluster manager named Kubernetes (or helmsmen in ancient greek) abreviated k8s. Briefly said Kubernetes is a framework for building distributed systems. Release 1.0 went public in July 2015 and Google created at the same time, in partnership with the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). ...